Josef Van Wissem teams up with Jim Jarmusch for craziest filmaker/musician collaboration of the year

When it comes to filmmaker/musician collaborations, the new LP featuring Dutch minimalist composer/lute player Josef Van Wissem and Stranger than Paradise/Broken Flowers/Coffee & Cigarettes director Jim Jarmusch makes the David Lynch/Danger Mouse/Sparklehorse collabo album Dark Night of the Soul look positively mainstream. For, you see, Van Wissem is no run-of-the-mill, bawdy summer Renaissance Festival, LARPing lute player. No — he is an artist, in the most all-encompassing, artiest sense of the world.

Van Wissem makes Renaissance and Baroque lute jams not just contemporary, but straight-up experimental. His music combines field recordings, electronics, and No Wave influences. He has collaborated with avant-garde luminaries such as James Blackshaw and Keiji Haino, and was even commissioned by London’s National Gallery to write a composition based on the Hans Holbein painting “The Ambassadors.” Fun fact: he also wrote lute and vocal melodies for the new medieval version of the Sims computer games.

And now, with the release of The Joy that Never Ends, Van Wissem’s collabo with Jarmusch (who plays the guitar and amps up the feedback) and vocalist Jeanne Madic, you too can live every day accompanied by the music of Mr. Van Wissem and his lute. JUST LIKE THE MEDIEVAL SIMS!!!! (Except that you’re actually sentient and breathing, but you get it.) The new album will be available as a CD or LP on Important Records come June 28. The LP is part of a limited run of 500, and the CD includes a bonus track. Check out “His Is the Ecstasy” here.

The Joy that Never Ends tracklisting:

01. The Joy that Never Ends
02. His is the Ecstasy
03. Concerning the Beautiful Human Form After Death
04. Concerning the Precise Nature of Truth
05. The Hearts of the Daughters Are Returned to their Mothers
06. The Great Joy (CD-only bonus track)

When it comes to filmmaker/musician collaborations, the new LP featuring Dutch minimalist composer/lute player Josef Van Wissem and Stranger than Paradise/Broken Flowers/Coffee & Cigarettes director Jim Jarmusch makes the David Lynch/Danger Mouse/Sparklehorse collabo album Dark Night of the Soul look positively mainstream. For, you see, Van Wissem is no run-of-the-mill, bawdy summer Renaissance Festival, LARPing lute player. No — he is an artist, in the most all-encompassing, artiest sense of the world.

Van Wissem makes Renaissance and Baroque lute jams not just contemporary, but straight-up experimental. His music combines field recordings, electronics, and No Wave influences. He has collaborated with avant-garde luminaries such as James Blackshaw and Keiji Haino, and was even commissioned by London’s National Gallery to write a composition based on the Hans Holbein painting “The Ambassadors.” Fun fact: he also wrote lute and vocal melodies for the new medieval version of the Sims computer games.

And now, with the release of The Joy that Never Ends, Van Wissem’s collabo with Jarmusch (who plays the guitar and amps up the feedback) and vocalist Jeanne Madic, you too can live every day accompanied by the music of Mr. Van Wissem and his lute. JUST LIKE THE MEDIEVAL SIMS!!!! (Except that you’re actually sentient and breathing, but you get it.) The new album will be available as a CD or LP on Important Records come June 28. The LP is part of a limited run of 500, and the CD includes a bonus track. Check out “His Is the Ecstasy” here.

The Joy that Never Ends tracklisting:

01. The Joy that Never Ends
02. His is the Ecstasy
03. Concerning the Beautiful Human Form After Death
04. Concerning the Precise Nature of Truth
05. The Hearts of the Daughters Are Returned to their Mothers
06. The Great Joy (CD-only bonus track)

Just like the calendar says, it’s been 30 years since 1981 and 30 years since Shonen Knife formed in Osaka, Japan. Over the course of countless albums, hundreds of tours, and three decades, they’ve become one of the most famous Japanese bands to head East and cross over to an American audience. To celebrate the anniversary, Shonen Knife have announced that they will be release a tribute album to The Ramones, titled Osaka Ramones: Tribute to The Ramones, through Good Charamel Records on July 19.

“Ramones were my all-time idols since I first heard their music from a radio and rushed to a record shop,” says Naoko, Shonen Knife’s guitarist and vocalist. “This year is the 30th anniversary of Shonen Knife. For celebration, we decided to record a cover album of our favorite band The Ramones. The title is Osaka Ramones with our respect. I’m very happy to release an Osaka Ramones project and to recognize their contri­bution to the evolution of Shonen Knife.”

Out in distant space, two mystic symbols reside. Though they spin peacefully through infinite space, eventually the pair shall collide, marking the arrival of a new Prince Rama album and… you know what? Forget it. I’m embarrassing myself. While the members of Prince Rama were raised on a Hare Krishna commune in Florida, I was raised in the suburbs of Mississippi, perhaps the least psychedelic place in existence. That said, Prince Rama are in fact releasing a new record, Trust Now, through Paw Tracks on October 4.

Trust Now is the Brooklyn-based psych band’s fifth album overall and their second for Paw Tracks, following up last year’s Shadow Temple (TMT Review). The record also happens to be the group’s first without member Michael Collins, who has taken a hiatus from the band. For the new record, the remaining members of the group, sisters Taraka and Nimai Larson, took to a 19th century church with producer Scott Colburn, who has produced a ton of Sun City Girls records. Colburn has also done work for Animal Collective and Arcade Fire, but I think the Sun City Girls stuff is what’s really key here.

At this very moment, the members of Prince Rama are in the midst of their residency at Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room. Their work there involves using VHS workout music to soundtrack group exorcisms and somehow “re-staging apocalypses through chopped and screwed pop songs,” all in the service of exploring the link between music and utopia. On Thursday, they’ll play Montreal’s Suoni Per il Popolo fest, but that seems considerably minor league in the face of re-staging apocalypses.

Clarence Clemons, the saxophonist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, whose jovial onstage manner, soul-rooted style and brotherly relationship with Mr. Springsteen made him one of rock’s most beloved sidemen, died Saturday at a hospital in Palm Beach, Fla. He was 69.

The cause was complications from a stroke, which he suffered last Sunday, said a spokeswoman for Mr. Springsteen.

From the beginnings of the E Street Band in 1972, Mr. Clemons played a central part in Mr. Springsteen’s music, complementing the group’s electric guitar and driving rhythms in songs like “Born to Run” and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” with muscular, melodic saxophone hooks that echoed doo-wop, soul and early rock ’n’ roll.

But equally important to the group’s image was the sense of affection and unbreakable camaraderie between Mr. Springsteen and his sax man. Few E Street Band shows were complete without a shaggy-dog story about the stormy night the two men met at a bar in Asbury Park, N.J., or a long bear hug between them at the end of the night.

Mr. Clemons also became something of a celebrity in his own right, acting in Martin Scorsese’s “New York, New York” and other films, and on television shows like “Diff’rent Strokes,” and jamming with President Bill Clinton at the 1993 inaugural ball.

Wild Man Fischer, a mentally ill street musician who became a darling of the pop music industry in the 1960s and as a result enjoyed four decades of strange, intermittent and often ill-fitting celebrity, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 66.

[…]

A singer-songwriter, Mr. Fischer was sometimes called the grandfather of Outsider music, but he was an outsider even by Outsider standards.

His voice was raspy and very loud. There was little tune to his melodies, and his lyrics had the repetitiveness and seeming simplicity of nursery rhymes. His singing, typically a cappella, was punctuated by vocal effects like hooting, wailing and shouting.

Whether Mr. Fischer was a naïve genius whose work embodied primal truths, or simply a madman who practiced a musicalized form of ranting, is the subject of continuing debate.

But he attracted — and retains — a cult following, which over time has included well-known figures in the music business. Among them were Frank Zappa, who produced Mr. Fischer’s first album; the child actor-turned-musician Bill Mumy; the radio host Dr. Demento; and the singer Rosemary Clooney, with whom Mr. Fischer recorded a duet.